#wwutd

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about goddamn time

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it's either an SVU detective or Anthony Bourdain. oof.

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thinking of doing a rewatch through anthony bourdain's series, start to finish, and doing manually captioned screenpcaps of my favorite moments (manually b/c the captioning on those shows for some reason is very garbage a lot of the time). if anyone else would be interested, let me know.

[themajessticone]

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These are frightening times for many. The world is changing and there is no stopping those changes. But in such times, there are always two ways to go: run and hide, build walls, cower in fear and suspicion, point the finger at our neighbors, look, like desperate frightened people do, for someone to blame. Or stand up and try - at least try - to build a better world. To look for, instead of a man on a horse to save us, or a wall to keep us apart, to our better angels.

-- Anthony Bourdain, closing remarks, Parts Unknown s8 e4, London, original air date October 22, 2016, shot a couple days after the Brexit vote was finalized.

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so like, I read "the quiet american" by graham greene based on Uncle Tony's recommendation, and it was amazing. fantastic book. I then picked up graham greene's "journey without maps", and it is THE MOST tedious 242 pages I have /ever/ tried to finish. srsly, fk, this book is so dry. but my stupid brain won't let me move on to another book until this is done. aaaaagh.

[rytron]

More and more these days I’m asking myself, What Would Utena Tenjou Do?

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start the journey of learning, as soon as you can.

The first oyster.

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will never not miss him.

"It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind."

—Anthony Bourdain, No Reservations

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WWUTD

‘Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you’ve never been. Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride.“

— Anthony Bourdain

Miss ya Tony.

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Very good piece.

Anthony Bourdain and the Importance of Passive Heroes

The death of Anthony Bourdain has left a significant gap in the American culture, one which I do not believe will be filled with any real haste. The news of his death to those unfamiliar with his work may have appeared to have been greatly exaggerated, as to the scope and influence his life had. However, upon pouring over all the beautiful words I’ve found the opposite to be true, that few people have earnestly reflected upon the fact that Bourdain’s output of work was an oasis in the desert of mainstream american pop-culture in a time when the country seems to be in a freefall towards a very dark future. Re-watching episodes of No Reservations or Parts Unknown in the days following his suicide has cast his persona in a slightly different light. What I was struck by most was his silence. Bourdain does not speak a lot on camera. Sure he narrates the show, provides historical context, even a stray opinion or two. There’s never been an argument that he was without a strong personality. Bourdain is far from a neutral party in any situation. However, when in Armenia, on one of his last aired episodes before his death, he focuses the camera on groups of people that he is situated within, and on the Armenians who do most of the talking. If Bourdain is speaking, he’s asking questions.

This, I believe, is one of the key elements of Bourdain’s work that is nearly absent from all other aspects of modern american audio-visual output. I teach film editing to college Freshman. One of the most difficult things for a college Freshman to edit is a dialogue sequence. If you give them a healthy amount of scene coverage of a conversation, 90% of first time editors will give you a cut that looks something like this: Wide shot of entire room. Actor A begins to speak. Cut to Close Up of actor A. Actor A finishes their line. Cut to Close Up of Actor B. Actor B speaks their line. Cut to Close Up of Actor A. Actor A speaks their line… etc. This shouldn’t be surprising. Because in America, we are conditioned to view scenes as a hierarchy. There are protagonists, who are of the most value. And there are scene stealers… who can be temporarily of more value than protagonists. Whoever is speaking, is of the most value. Whoever is making their voice heard, must by extension, deserve to be seen. This is the inherent value system almost all American Freshman film students have as they begin their journey. There is no hint that maybe a character who says little, or nothing at all, could be a protagonist, or the focus of a scene. Or that possibly no individual person is the single focus of a scene. The idea of trying to show a community, or a culture rather than an individual is a completely foreign concept. This is why Anthony Bourdain’s television series were so unique. They radically insisted on committing wholeheartedly to an aesthetic and moral ideology that was completely antithetical to all other media being produced, as well as to the basic structures of our society. It feels anachronistic.

Bourdain’s character as presented through his various television series reminds me first of Allan Gray, the protagonist in Carl Theodore Dreyer’s 1932 German film Vampyr. When viewed in a modern context the most striking aspect of this film is the hero’s passivity. The story doesn’t revolve around him at all. In fact, he spends most of the first half of the film simply staring through windows where the story unfolds to other characters. Depending on which version of the movie you saw, he may even not have much of a role beyond mere observation in the ultimate killing of the titular vampire. I find myself wondering what a passive, but certainly not an apathetic, character says about a film and about the culture at large which produces such a film. Permitting myself to wax poetic a moment, if dreams are the gateway to the psyche, and our films are the collective dreams of a culture, perhaps the characterizations we present and propagate are direct manifestations of the ways in which we see ourselves or wish to be. If that is so, then Vampyr says something which feels very beautiful and perfectly contradictory to what was happening in Europe and particularly Germany in the 1930s, just as Bourdain says something beautiful and contradictory to America in 2018.

Allan Gray is a passive character throughout much of Vampyr, but also wholly empathetic to the problems of the small town he has only just wandered into. He has no ties, no family, no place in the greater horror arc of the film. Compare this to any modern American horror film with a supernatural plot. For example Hereditary, in the end, is about the reincarnation of a Satanic deity. One of the lead characters is the literal rebirth of this demon, while the other is the demon’s desired host body. These characters are focused upon in the film solely because they are of instrumental importance to the plot at hand (both in terms of filmmaking, and in the conspiracy within the story.) They learn what they learn, and choose their actions based upon the ways in which the knowledge gleaned will help them, and the actions taken may save them. As an audience member, sure, I empathize with their actions. I would likely behave similarly if placed into such a fantastic situation. However, Allan Gray is not the heir apparent of his film’s vampire. He is not engaged to a woman involved in a secret cult. He is a traveler who showed up in a small town during a time of distress, and observed what happened. Not to save himself, but because knowledge has inherent value. Empathy with what others are going through is as important as self-preservation. Allan Gray is a collectivist hero, because he is focused on things outside of himself. As was Anthony Bourdain.

In the Haiti episode of No Reservations Bourdain sees himself as an active participant in helping with the world’s problems, if only in a small way. He buys food for a group of people who are going hungry, and accidentally incites a small riot. He recognizes the individual desire for heroism has effects, often negative, on others. He articulates this to the audience, and this lesson informs his more passive approach to travel in the future episodes he produces. Heroism for the individual, however well intentioned, is often terrorism for those outside the individual per-view. Thus observation can be of greater value than action, especially if one is unaware of the potential repercussions of an action. Another point that comes from several of the Haitians who are given the opportunity to speak during this episode: Haiti must be re-built by Haitians. Foreigners cannot do it, because they don’t really know what the fallout of their aid might be, and in the end, they’re not the ones who must deal with that fallout.

In the previously mentioned Armenia episode of Parts Unknown Bourdain seeks to learn about Armenian identity, and their fight for recognition and the recognition of the genocide which taints their past. He is not Armenian, he has no stake in this ongoing controversy, but he knows there is value in witnessing those who do. In listening to them. In being an empathetic presence who genuinely cares what your problems are, however distant and foreign to himself those problems may be. America is a culture famous for its rugged individualism, and in 2018 we seem to have hit the critical mass of how far that can be taken before any sense of humanity is lost for good. Bourdain was a radical in his complete shunning of this perspective. As was Vampyr in 1932 Germany. What came next in Germany was ugly. What comes next in America will likely not be pretty. Vampyr was released to boos in Berlin in 1932. Which ultimately led in the re-editing of the film, with one change in particular, the more active role of Allan Gray in the overall plot of the hunting and killing of the Vampire, doing significant damage to cohesion of the characterization. Bourdain committed suicide in Strasbourg on June 8th 2018 leaving a gap for genuine empathetic passivity. We’re left with heroes who are only gathering information and traveling the world for individualized reasonings. For personal gain, for love, for a vendetta, for fun. No one is listening anymore, everyone is talking. Those who don’t talk don’t get a close-up. This means the impetus for empathy and intellectual engagement is not on our heroes anymore. It is on us. The audience members. Those in Germany in 1932 were not up for that task. I truly hope that we are.

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I can hear this in his voice as I read it.

“Everyone should see how complicated, how deeply troubled and yet at the same time beautiful and awesome the world can be. "Everyone should experience—even as the clouds gather—what’s at stake, what could be lost, what’s still here, and never let that hope go.”

Bourdain

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her spot in the nashville episode of anthony bourdain: parts unknown - nashville (s8 e2) is phenomenal and moving.

Margo Price - All American Made

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a fucking fantastic episode.

Serj Tankian on Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown: Armenia

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may or may not have reblogged this one before, but this is such a great shot of him. shot during the Buenos Aires episode of Parts Unknown, from the film Roadrunner.

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ain't nothin wrong with that